


The One Where Ray Can Hear Sex Dreams

by Bexless



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Crack, Friendship, Gen, Podfic Available, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-30
Updated: 2011-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-21 23:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bexless/pseuds/Bexless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm really sorry, Mr. Toro. But I didn't make you have sex with anyone, as per your request.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Where Ray Can Hear Sex Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> For Whatchamacall1t :)
> 
> Podfic by Greedy Dancer [here](http://greedy-dancer.livejournal.com/539867.html).

Ray likes to think that he’s a pretty easy-going guy.

In the music business, there are a lot of very highly-strung individuals to deal with. In his *own band* there are a lot of highly-strung individuals to deal with. Well, okay. There’s just Gerard, but he counts for at least three and a half. So you need easy-going people to balance them out, and Ray? Ray’s that guy.

Ray also likes to think that he puts up with a lot – being left behind, for example, or having his hair straightened or Frank beating him up because Ray won’t share his Fritos or allowing Gerard to sleep in his bunk because his own ‘feels empty, like there’s someone watching me’.

Ray doesn’t point out that if someone were in Gerard’s bunk watching him, it wouldn’t be empty, it would be, you know, pretty full. He just scoots over and makes room for Gerard, even though he talks in his sleep and he’s a kicker and he always leaves after an hour or so and *wakes Ray up to say he’s going*, even though Ray has made it very clear that he does not need to be kept informed of Gerard’s crazy night-time schedule.

He asked once why Gerard doesn’t go and bug Mikey when he’s afraid, or Frank (but not Bob, obviously, because they all know how Bob gets) and Gerard said, “Duh, your hair,” like that explained anything at all.

Ray puts up with it, because Ray’s that guy. It’s not so bad - he has his little makeshift studio to escape to, and he knows it’s really for him even though the other guys pretend they all love it as much as he does, and he never got left behind as often as he makes out in interviews.

So Ray doesn’t mind being that guy. It’s all good.

It’s all good, until Ray wakes up and hears Frank and Gerard going at it in the bunk above his own.

It is NOT COOL to have audible sex when other people are in the vicinity. It is definitely in the NOT COOL column of the list Ray and Bob drew up a month into the tour, along with ‘Leaving empty cups in the lounge’, ‘Borrowing Bob’s porn without asking’, ‘Making fun of Gerard’s warm-up noises’ and ‘Brian’.

Ray’s pretty sure it’s also NOT COOL to be having secret sexy shenanigans with other members of the band – but there’ll be time to ask when Gerard and Frank started getting naked together *later*, when everyone has stopped making noises that Ray never, ever, ever needs to hear again.

“Yo!” he yells, and kicks the roof of his bunk. “Cut it out, assholes.”

“What the hell, Toro,” Frank mutters sleepily in the bunk across the aisle.

Wait.

What?

Ray flings his curtain back and stares at Frank, who’s rubbing his eyes and frowning.

“But,” says Ray, and then stops, because if Gerard’s not up there with Frank, who is it? “Oh my God.” He leaps out of bed and throws back the curtain to Gerard’s bunk. “What are you doing to Bob?”

Lucky for Bob, though, Gerard is alone in there, and he jerks awake violently, throwing his hand out in the general direction of Ray’s face. “Shit!”

Ray stares at him. Gerard stares back. He looks pretty mad, and kind of red in the face, too, like -

“Oh my God,” says Ray, and he can feel the words coming, he knows he shouldn’t say them, but it’s like he’s powerless and Gerard will just have to forgive him like Ray forgave Gerard for that thing with the doll’s house because, “You were dreaming about having sex with Frank!”

Gerard’s mouth drops open, but instead of looking embarrassed or furious or any of the things Ray would be right about now, he gets this look on his face like someone just told him Santa Claus is real and gasps, “You can see my dreams? That’s so cool!”

“It’s not cool!” This isn’t happening. It is *not*. Ray cannot be unlucky enough to be born with a girl’s voice *and* the ability to hear other people’s sex dreams. There’s just no way. “And I couldn’t see it, I could just hear it. In horrifying detail.”

“Was I any good?” Frank is *grinning*. What the hell is wrong with everyone?

Gerard shrugs. “You were okay.”

Ray stares wildly from Gerard to Frank and back again, and then enunciates carefully, because he doesn’t want to have to say this more than once. “You guys. I CAN HEAR YOUR DREAMS. Is nobody concerned about this?”

“I’m concerned about what’s going to happen to you if you wake Bob up,” Mikey pokes his head out of his own bunk. “You know how he gets.”

“I don’t care how Bob gets!” Ray says, but quietly, because he totally does. He points at Gerard, who is - gross – re-enacting a highlight from his dream for Frank, using mime. “Stop that. This is your fault.”

Gerard laughs, and swings out of the bunk. He’s wearing green plaid pajamas. “How is it my fault? I didn’t give you special pow – oh.” Gerard stops on his way to the kitchen, and turns around slowly, a vague look of concern sliding across his face. “Um.”

Ray doesn’t let his hands curl into fists, because he’s not that guy. “What. What did you do?”

***

It turns out that what Gerard did was to have a fit of frustration over his latest comic book project, shove it aside, and start doodling members of the band as superheroes, “Just for fun, you know?”

But apparently, because Gerard is a complete asshole, he gave them lame, embarrassing, sex-related superpowers.

“Because it’s *us*,” he’s trying to explain, leaning forward all earnest and sincere and Gerard-y. Ray hates him. “C’mon. We wouldn’t be able to fly or any cool shit like that. Let’s be realistic, here.”

“Yes, let’s.” Ray knows he’s being shrill, but he can’t help it. “Let’s be *realistic* about the comic book you drew where we all had *lame superpowers* and then it *came to life*. Let’s be realistic about that.”

Frankie is spreading the drawings out over the small table, rifling through the capes and spandex. He stops and holds up a drawing that’s obviously him, regular him, small and scribbled all over with tattoos. “You didn’t give me any powers? Dude. That’s weak.”

Gerard goes red. Gerard is not a pretty blusher, Ray notes with satisfaction. “You didn’t need a costume. You can, uh. You can communicate with animals.”

Frankie brightens, and Ray turns on Gerard, furious. “That’s a cool superpower!”

“Not really.” Gerard clears his throat. “He can only do it when the animal in question is having sex. Uh. With him.”

There’s a silence. Then Frankie nods at Mikey, who punches Gerard in the arm.

***

So it turns out that Mikey can speed-read internet porn, and Bob (when in a combat situation) has the proportional strength of a midget stripper, and Gerard can turn regular condoms into flavored, just by breathing on them and Ray, obviously, can hear people’s sex dreams.

Which is totally unfair, because Gerard does not need to exhale near birth control on a daily basis, and Mikey doesn’t even read that much internet porn, and Bob doesn’t need to fight anyone and Frankie does not, as far as Ray knows (and if he’s wrong, well, he hopes he dies ignorant) need to have sex with animals.

Ray, on the other hand, is totally screwed, because everybody needs to sleep.

Nobody listens when Ray tries to point this out - Frankie just waves his hand because he’s busy whining to Mikey about how Gerard didn’t give him a costume. Mikey is pointedly ignoring him in favor of his Sidekick, Gerard is paging through the online archives of every comic he’s ever read, trying to find some precedent for a cure, and Bob is refusing to engage in it at all, choosing instead to call his mom and find out how the renovations to her bathroom are coming along.

Sometimes, Ray really wishes that he were like Bob, that he could just let the insanity that follows them around wash gently over him, like a completely unimportant wave.

But he can’t. He’s not that guy.

He *is* the guy who’s going to make sure nobody goes to sleep ever again, though, and by two o’ clock in the morning when they’ve played a show and been on the road since the beginning of time, he’s less popular than that time he couldn’t save video-Mikey’s life.

“I’m not going to have a sex dream!” Frank insists, pulling the blanket up over his head. “Just let me sleep, Ray, Jesus.”

Ray stands in the aisle and folds his arms. “And what am I supposed to do if you start dreaming about boning Gerard?”

“He’s not going to dream about boning me,” says Gerard, hanging out of his own bunk.

Ray scoffs. “You dreamt about boning him!”

Frank peeks out from under the blanket. “For the record, though, Gee, if we had sex, I would be boning you, not the other way around.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“You look like a chick,” says Frank, “And you make those, you know, sexy noises.”

“You look like a chick too,” Gerard points out, “And if you were boning me, the only noises I would be making would be those of confusion because I am not the bone-ee out of the two of us. I am the boner.”

“You’re not the boner.”

“Oh, I so am the boner.”

“The only thing you so are? Is the bone-ee.”

“I’m not the bone-ee!”

“You’re totally the bone-ee,” Bob says from behind his book, which pisses Ray off because Bob can’t just decide to get involved whenever he wants after leaving Ray to deal with this by himself all day.

Gerard rolls his eyes. “Fine, next time I dream about having sex with you, I’ll try and remember who’s supposed to be pitching.”

“You shouldn’t be dreaming about having sex with him at all!” Ray is seriously – he’s going to kill someone, here. “We shouldn’t have sex dreams about each other! We’re men! Men who are friends!”

Bob puts down his book and fixes Ray with a Stare. “You need to chill out, Toro. You’re getting homophobi-hair.”

“I can’t chill out! People are having sex dreams!”

“They’re just *dreams*, Ray.” Gerard rolls back into his bunk and plugs himself into his iPod. “They don’t mean anything, come on. Like you’ve never had a sex dream about someone you don’t actually find attractive.”

Frank’s head is under his pillow, but Ray still hears him say, “Hey. I am very attractive.”

“Sure you are,” Bob reaches over and pats his shoulder.

Ray sits on the floor and puts his head in his hands. “This is the worst thing that you have ever done, Gerard. Worse even than that thing with the doll’s house.”

Gerard hums quietly, out-of-tune, oblivious. Frank has already succumbed to sleep and Bob has retreated, in that way he has, into his little cocoon of sanity.

Mikey wanders in, snapping his phone shut. “So I called Pete.”

Ray doesn’t lift his head out of his hands. “Oh, because *he’ll* know what to do.”

“Actually, yeah.” Mikey sounds like this is a totally mundane conversation, but he could be freaking out. He’s so monotone, Ray can’t even tell most of the time. Gerard says the clue is in Mikey’s hair, but Ray doesn’t get it. Gerard thinks *everything* is about hair. “He says shit like this happens to Fall Out Boy all the time, and we have to just ride it out and eventually, you know, things will go back to normal.”

He gets into his bunk, and Ray is left alone on the floor, listening to Mikey hum along with Gerard, both of them off-key but perfectly in tune with each other.

At some point he falls asleep.

***

Ray wakes up to Gerard and Frankie’s raised voices, *again*, but this time they’re fighting and Ray doesn’t think it’s a dream.

He pulls himself off the floor – his arm is totally numb, shit – and stumbles down to the lounge. Gerard and Frankie are yelling at each other and Frank is holding a bunch of Gerard’s drawings in his hand.

“If we destroy them, it’ll make everything go back to normal,” he insists, crumpling the paper slightly.

Gerard lunges for them, following Frankie up onto the couch and grabbing at his hands. “Or it could make everything stick this way forever, asshole, god, it’s like you’ve never read a single comic book.”

They grapple back and forth, wobbling on the couch cushions, arms windmilling as they shriek at each other and exchange feeble slaps and feebler punches.

Bob is observing from the kitchenette. He looks at Ray. “It’s like being back in Japan. Everyone’s tiny and high-pitched and in need of sedation.”

“The Japanese fans have some dignity, though,” Ray reminds him, skirting warily past the harajuku boys and into the kitchenette with Bob.

Maybe he stands a little behind Bob, out of harm’s way. Nobody can prove anything.

Gerard and Frank flail and swipe at each other for a few more seconds, and then Mikey walks in and says, “So, I just read some internet porn, and I don’t think I was doing it super-fast, or anything.”

Everyone stops and looks at him.

Mikey shrugs with one shoulder. “I thought I should say something, you know. Before someone breaks a nail.”

Gerard hops off the couch. “We have to test the rest of them!”

“I think I should get to fight Bob,” Frankie sounds pretty gleeful at the prospect of a fight with Bob which he has a chance in ten million of winning. “For research.”

“I’m not fighting anyone,” Bob says, and obviously Frank isn’t going to have sex with an animal, and Ray can’t tell if his power is still there while everyone’s awake (“I could try fantasizing really, really hard,” Frank suggests, but even when he’s purple in the face with imagining Bob in stockings and a garter belt – just to spite Ray, you understand – Ray’s got nothing) and that leaves Gerard.

Mikey fishes a condom out of his pocket and hands it over. “Here you go.”

Gerard looks at it. He wrinkles his nose. “I hate putting these things in my mouth, man.”

Ray is never, ever going to ask how Gerard knows that. Instead, he watches as Gerard unwraps the rubber, breathes on it for a few seconds and then sticks his tongue out the tiniest bit, wincing.

Everyone holds their breath. Gerard brings the condom up to his face.

“I can’t do it!” he says, flinching back at the last minute. “It’s gross!”

Ray sighs. “Gerard, you used to put Bert McCracken in your mouth. This is not that bad.”

“Bert has cool hair,” says Gerard, who, seriously, what is this obsession? “And he’s not made from latex.”

This prompts a full-band argument about whether Gerard sleeping with Bert or Mikey sleeping with Pete was worse, and Ray notices Gerard sliding the condom further and further away from him across the table, like he thinks they’ll all forget.

Ray gives up. This is just one of those things he has to do, right? He’s that guy.

He picks the condom up and puts it into his mouth.

Everyone stops arguing and stares at him.

Ray spits the condom out into his hand. It is gross, Gerard got that right – but more importantly, it’s blessedly latex-flavored. “Not a hint of pina colada,” he announces, and throws the condom at Gerard’s face.

It bounces off his chin and lands on his leg. Gerard looks at it with a faint expression of disappointment. “Oh.”

Ray closes his eyes and heaves a huge sigh of relief. ‘No more overheard sex dreams for me,’ he thinks gleefully. He’s actually looking forward to going to bed.

What he doesn’t know is that after the show, Gerard and Frankie will huddle, grinning and shushing each other in the bunk above Ray’s. They will wait until he falls asleep, and then start making enthusiastic sex noises at the tops of their voices.

Ray, after reassuring himself that nobody’s dreaming, will roll his eyes and put earplugs in, because he’s that guy.

Bob will get out of his bunk, haul Frankie down from Gerard’s and give them both dead legs, because he’s *that* guy.

Mikey will sleep through the whole thing, because – well. You get the idea.

  



End file.
